If you’re reading this, you’re most likely a small business owner or a marketer working for a small business looking for ideas to help increase revenue, site traffic, and brand awareness, while — most importantly — developing effective and engaging content. Well, have I got an awesome engagement tool to tell you about today.

Over the years, many studies have been conducted to track eye movements. In that time, computers and their usage have evolved to expose a correlation between the computer mouse and eye movements, effectively teaching people how our hands and eyes work together when working on a computer.

Tracking analytics have also come a long way since their initial development; however, statistical analysis is a true art. Not everyone is as highly skilled at putting together the correct formulas at highly complex levels to obtain the right information as people who are inherently visual.

Heat maps have brought an entirely new level of intelligence to the process of determining the intuitive usability of your website.

Heat maps show you which calls to action are working — and which are not. They show you the highest clicked areas of your site, and they allow you to qualitatively determine what types of content are working for you with quantitative measurements you can’t visually imagine. One of the key uses for implementing a heat map into your website or blog is to continually improve it and make the most effective use of your online real estate.

Below is a snapshot of how our Cultivate Communications blog homepage, and why we’re making significant improvements to it. (Stay tuned for Cultivate’s all-new Website Grand Opening in a few weeks!)

As you can see, during the inception of our Cultivate website, there were few, if any, calls to action on the main site. We weren’t fostering a conversation OR using our online real estate properly. People who found our site were going to the only place they were shown – the Read More button on the first article link (and the Search Form [not shown] at the bottom of the site).

This heat map we used on our blog’s landing page is just one example of how heat maps can be a valuable tool for those of us who are visually, strategically, and creatively oriented.

Heat maps show us — at a glance — what IS working, what ISN’T working, and what we could be doing EVEN BETTER.

Sometimes you need that visual element so the team can come back to the table and strategize the next move in the right direction and in conjunction with the data-driven analytics piece of the pie.

The tools available today are so abundant and so awesome.

If you ever feel you’re stuck and don’t know where to go with your business marketing strategy or web developments, let’s chat!